food manufacturer knorr has executed machine vision at its sachet packaging plant, which is located in heilbronn, germany to offer a quality check of the seals on the sachets. this system is consisted of insight explorer vision software with inbuilt patmax pattern recognition technology, cognex insight micro camera and a cognex visionview 700 visualisation panel. aku.automation of aalen, germany had installed the system. at stages of highspeed sachet production operations, sporadic production errors can occur in the final or filling sealing stage. knorr needs zero errors on its production lines. a manual check at the ending of the production line is replaced by the vision system. the relief of the welded layers is inspected, and defective welds or any material overlaps are detected immediately, and the product is dismissed. another significant quality parameter is the angle at which the welded seam makes with the external edge of the bag. with the help of patmax pattern recognition technology, the insight micro figures out the observed values. then by using an internal processor, it checks the observed values against the tolerance values. if there is undershoot or overshoot, it gives a notinorder sign to the plc. plc then removes that product from the process. the imaging professionals aku.automation has succeeded to boost the evaluation rate to 840 frames per minute. this became possible by cropping the pictures to the image areas which are relevant for quality checking. because of the insight micro&rsquos small dimensions, which is 30 x 30 x 60mm, it has a very wide range of fitting options. hence, it can be used nearly anywhere in the production stripe. the visionview user interface display makes monitoring of the manufacturing as well as inspection process very easy. source of information httpwww.imveurope.comnewsnewsstory.phpnewsid1000